What the Cat Saw

She arranged the vitamin supplements on the counter in a neat line. A, B, C, D, E — a pharmacopoeia of hope she'd bought on her lunch break. The pharmacist had smiled when she'd purchased them all at once, as if her desperation were charming.

Her cat, Miso, watched from the windowsill with his usual judgmental stare. He'd been Mark's cat originally, which explained everything about Miso's personality — prickly, emotionally unavailable, prone to sudden disappearances only to return when hungry.

She poured herself a glass of water, hands trembling. The doctor had called it "precautionary," but her brain had spent three days constructing elaborate scenarios. Now the results were in, sitting unread on her iPhone, and she couldn't bring herself to look.

The palm reader at that bachelorette party last month had grabbed her hand, traced the lifeline with a chipped nail, and promised: "You'll outlive the ones you think you can't live without." At the time, drunk on cheap champagne, she'd laughed. Now, staring at her open palm, she wondered if the woman had been psychic or just perceptive.

Miso knocked the vitamins off the counter with deliberate malice.

"Dammit, Miso."

He blinked, tail twitching: You're welcome.

She sank to the floor, gathering the scattered capsules. Something about the absurdity of it finally broke her — sitting on cold tiles at 2 AM, collecting health supplements while her marriage quietly dissolved in the other room, where Mark was probably asleep, or pretending to be.

Her fingers found the iPhone. The notification glowed. Benign, it said. Benign.

She should feel relieved. Instead, she felt hollow. She'd wanted something, anything, to be real enough to force them both to wake up.

Miso padded over and headbutted her arm. Just once. A concession.

She took a sip of water and let herself cry, really cry, for the first time in months. The cat stayed, a warm, judgmental weight against her side.

In the morning, she'd leave. She'd take Miso. She'd figure out what benign meant for a life that needed something worse than benign to justify change.

For now, she just sat on the floor and let herself be broken enough to maybe, eventually, heal.